Japan demands Sony prove PlayStation Network is safe before restart

Service for Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) is finally being restored in the US and across the globe after a long outage, but the company’s home country of Japan still hasn’t approved the restart of the service, according to a report by the Dow Jones Newswires.

Sony won’t be allowed to restore PSN in Japan until it proves that it has followed through with preventative measures for future hacking attacks, and it has taken further measures to protect consumer credit card and personal information, Japanese official Kazushige Nobutani told Dow Jones.

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It’s not surprising that Japan is being more strict with Sony than other countries — the company’s PSN outage isn’t just a stain on its reputation, it also makes Japan look bad.

“We are still in talks with various authorities (in Japan and Asia),” Sony spokeswoman Kumie Tanaka told Dow Jones.” By receiving advice from the industry ministry, we would like to have the service in Japan ready.”

Sony will likely be focusing its energy on getting PSN approved this week, now that it’s quickly restoring service across the world. Otherwise, the company won’t be able to easily explain to Japanese gamers why they’re still blocked from PSN while the rest of the world has access to the service.

The hack on Sony’s systems affected some 100 million users, including 77 million PSN users and 24 million users from its online gaming portal Station.com. Earlier this month, Sony blamed the attack on the hacking group Anonymous. Thanks to the PSN outage, PlayStation 3 users were unable to play multiplayer games, download demos, and take advantage of other services like Hulu and Netflix for almost a month.

Via Engadget

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